Conceptual Models of Political DiscourseFor the last several years, I have been interested in the ways in which people speak about and reason through complex political issues. My work in this area of discourse, semantics, and cognitive linguistics involves building small corpora of relevant discourse from online public data. Using these corpora, I look for the conceptual models hidden behind overt language. These models are built upon cognitive primitives such as conceptual metaphor, frames, and conceptual blends. Recently my attention has shifted to the topics of immigration and gender identity. With the help of graduate students at SFSU, I am in the process of building a corpus of metaphorical language used to talk about gender identity and gender transition. Hugh Ryan recently wrote an interesting piece in Slate alluding to some of my work in this area. I presented initial findings of my work on metaphorical gesturing in coming out narratives at the 6th Conference of the International Society for Gesture Studies in San Diego, July 2014, and in 2015 I published an article summarizing the metaphorical models used to understand transition in the linguistics journal Metaphor and Symbol. Concerning immigration, I published an paper analyzing the hidden inferences associated with the term ‘anchor baby’, a pejorative label used to describe the children of undocumented immigrants in the United States. This article appears in the Journal of Pragmatics October 2013 issue. In addition to my interest in identifying relevant cognitive models, my research is increasingly focused on exploring quantitative methodology to validate the conceptual salience of these models. To this end, I have begun to probe new corpus techniques which can be used to evaluate the strength of conceptual metaphors in naturally occurring language data. I presented recent findings in this research area in July 2015 at CogSci 2015 , in June 2016 at the NAACL Fourth Workshop on Metaphor in NLP, and a recently published article (Dec 2016) in the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics.

The Semantics of ReflexivityMy second strain of research involves the investigation of how languages encode reflexive actions. I began this work in my dissertation in which I investigated the spatial factors that influence the distribution of English and Spanish pronouns in the prepositional phrase. It turns out the distribution of pronouns in this syntactic domain, often characterized as a kind of free zone for anaphora (both reflexive and nonreflexive pronouns are found within), is not haphazard at all. Both literal and metaphorical spatial relations reliably predict the differential frequency of pronoun type across prepositions. These findings are summarized in an article I published in 2013 in Cognitive Linguistics. My interest in anaphora and the prepositional phrase has lead to an ongoing typological study of intrinsic and extrinsic reflexivity. Some events like bathing and shaving are activities we canonically perform on ourselves. Other events like shooting and loving are actions and states we most often direct at others. Most languages differentially encode these two types of reflexive events, but they do so in different ways. I am in the process of building a database of language samples representing these two types of reflexivity, and reported on findings and implications of this typology at CSDL 2014.

Language RevitalizationThe preservation and revitalization of endangered languages is close to my heart. During my graduate career at UC Berkeley I worked on language revitalization initiatives with the Cachil Dehe Band of Wintun Indians in Colusa CA. In 2004, I helped them produce a phrasebook of their basically "dead" language, Patwin, for use within the tribe. Last year we have begun a new project to produce a language application for smart phones and tablets in order to teach the young tribal members basic vocabulary and drum up interest in some small-scale revitalization of the language. You can see a sample of what the language app will look like by downloading a free copy of a similar app produced my the Lakota tribe from the iTunes store. Here’s an article about the app from South Dakota.